Mouin Rabbani questions why FIFA and UEFA haven’t responded to the violence involving Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam

Daniel Levy says the clashes between Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans, pro-Palestinian protesters not about anti-Semitism.

Tensions in Dutch capital had been brewing after Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans took down a Palestine flag.

The ban was imposed after violence involving Israeli football supporters around the Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax game.

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer. Its fans—blond-haired men with beer guts, boys with blue eyes—sing “Hava Nagila” as they cram into the trams taking them to the stadium on the fringes of Amsterdam. Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.   

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.” What followed was a textbook example of a pogrom: mobs chasing Jews down city streets, goons punching and kicking Jews crouched helplessly in corners, an orgy of hate-filled violence.

That this attack transpired on the streets of Amsterdam is beyond ironic. At least 75 percent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. But there was an affectionate Yiddish nickname for the city: mokum, “safe place.” After the Spanish Inquisition, Holland absorbed Iberian Jewry, which flourished there. Amsterdam was the city that hid Anne Frank, the most famous example of righteous Gentiles taking risks on behalf of Jewish neighbors. And then there was Ajax.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust in the city supported the team, as they had before the war. No Dutch club had a larger Jewish fan base, because no Dutch city was as Jewish as Amsterdam. They were supporting a club on the brink of glory. Ajax reinvented the global game by introducing a strategic paradigm called total football, a free-flowing style of play that exuded the let-loose spirit of the ’60s. Led by the genius Johan Cruyff, perhaps the most creative player in the history of the game, Ajax became an unexpected European powerhouse.

During those glorious postwar years, Ajax had two Jewish players; three of the club’s presidents were Jews. Before games, the team would order a kosher salami for good luck. Yiddish phrases were part of locker-room banter. In Brilliant Orange, David Winner’s extraordinary book about Dutch soccer, Ajax’s (Jewish) physiotherapist is quoted as saying the players “liked to be Jewish even though they weren’t.” It isn’t hard to see the psychology at work. By embracing Yiddishkeit, Ajax players and fans were telling themselves a soothing story: Their parents might have been Nazi collaborators and bystanders to evil, but they weren’t.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?]

Israelis took great pleasure in Ajax’s affiliation, and they especially revered Cruyff. His family had Jewish relatives—a connection he honored on a trip to Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. It was said that he once walked down the streets of Tel Aviv wearing a kippah, and was a devoted fan of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Israelis embraced Cruyff as one of their own.

But Ajax’s rival clubs exploited this history, this strange identity, to taunt its players and fans with anti-Semitic bile. Among the common chants deployed at Ajax games: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” To taunt Ajax, these fans would make the hissing noise, mimicking the release of Zyklon B. Dutch authorities never effectively cracked down on this omnipresent Jew hatred.

Philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism went hand in hand during the postwar years. It wasn’t so different from the way that American sports franchises turned Indigenous tribes into mascots. Only after Jews or Native Americans have been wiped out by genocide can they become vehicles for the majority population to have some fun at the murdered group’s expense. And behind even Ajax’s nominal expressions of love, there was something profoundly disturbing: Jews barely existed in Holland, yet they remained an outsize obsession.

After videos of the violence emerged from Amsterdam in various media outlets, there could be no denying the global surge of anti-Semitism. But a swath of the press—and an even larger swath of social media—has minimized the assault, sometimes unintentionally. Some headlines described the anti-Semitic nature of the assaults in quotation marks, despite all the conclusive evidence about the motive of the mob. Because some of the Israeli fans ripped Palestinian flags off buildings and chanted bigoted slogans, it was implied, the mob was justified in stabbing and beating Jews. Such widespread ambivalence over the attack reflects a culture that shrugs in the face of anti-Jewish violence, which treats it as an unavoidable facet of life after October 7.

But the most bitter fact of all is that these assaults transpired the same evening that the Dutch commemorated the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. In the presence of actual Jews, the Dutch failed them again.

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The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

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A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

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Atlantic Intelligence: AI-powered search is killing the internet’s curiosity, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: A century-old novel offers a unique antidote to contempt and despair, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Details of incidents unclear, but Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters damaged Palestinian flags in city before match.